Welcome to issue 48 of JavaScript Weekly. An interesting week with the much anticipated unveiling of Google Dart just a few days ago. A special once-only section has been dedicated to it here today. If you wish to follow Dart long term, subscribe to our new sister newsletter: Dart Weekly :-)

Headlines

jQuery 1.7 Beta 2 Released—
Hot off the momentum of the jQuery Conference in Boston earlier this month, and based on the community's feedback, the jQuery core team have released a new beta of 1.7 incorporating many fixes and stability improvements.

JavaScript++: New Language Offering JavaScript (Plus A Bit More)—
JavaScript++ is a JavaScript-derived language that adds a Java/C# flavor of class-based OOP to JavaScript and it compiles down to regular JavaScript, a la CoffeeScript. It looks interesting but may have a battle on its hands against Google's Dart and JavaScript's trademark holder.

At the 2011 GoTo Conference in Denmark, Google unveiled 'Dart', a new programming language that's being tipped to take on JavaScript in the Web-focused programming language space. See what it's all about at its official homepage.

Efficient Encapsulation of JavaScript Objects—
Encapsulation is a key principle of object oriented programming. Ideally, an object exposes a limited public interface and keeps its data and implementation details private. In this post, Andrew Davey looks into some ways of achieving this in JavaScript.

A Tour of ECMAScript 5's Array Methods—
Jimmy Cudara presents the last in a series of posts about ECMAScript 5 (the language spec behind JavaScript) focusing on the new high level array methods. There are some handy iteration and transformation functions covered here.

Go-Flavored JavaScript—
John Tantalo was intrigued by Google's Go language and decided to reimplement some Go code in JavaScript along with Go's 'goroutine' and channel features. The resulting JavaScript is unusual but potentially useful in other scenarios.

Videos and Media

The Future of JavaScript with David Herman of Mozilla—
Mozilla's David Herman talks about ECMAScript.Next or, more practically, the future of JavaScript. He touches on modules, expressiveness, interruptible functions, and more. It clocks in at 36 minutes, there's plenty of code, and it's well recorded.

CoffeeScript Koans - Koans to Learn CoffeeScript—
Koans are short code exercises designed to stretch your mind and let you solve a small code puzzle, all backed by passing an automated test. They're popular in the Ruby world but now you can learn some CoffeeScript with them too.

Cucumber-JS: Pure JavaScript Cucumber (A BDD Tool)—
Cucumber is a popular BDD tool in the Ruby world that heavily leans on writing plain text stories which are then processed by regular expressions. Cucumber-JS is an official JavaScript port that's currently in progress.

Chris Williams, of JSConf fame, has put up a repository containing a community-developed JavaScript logo in various formats, as unveiled at JSConf EU 2011. You're free to use it however you like. I hope it (or something similar) catches on.